Schelling and Modern European Philosophy by Bowie Andrew

Author:Bowie, Andrew [ANDREW BOWIE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2011-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

(WA I p. 15)

The key structural factor is, then, that ‘the will which wills/wants nothing’ can remain negative, in that it is absolutely within itself, because it does not entail any sense of possibility or development, but as such also does not entail any lack in itself, which is the highest affirmation. The move to determinacy in the WA entails conflict, of a kind that is there in all forms of being that we know: it is also, though, our awareness of the desire to move beyond conflict that constitutes our access to this preceding state.

The vital question now addressed by Schelling is ‘By what was this happiness (Seligkeit) moved to leave its purity and to step out into being?’ (ibid. p. 16): the problem of Philosophy and Religion that echoes through the later work. If pure actuality really is pure, there can be no reason for it to move beyond itself, because that would entail a sense that it has potential that can be actualised, which would make it dependent upon actualising itself to be fully itself. This suggests two possibilities: either that there is no ‘Highest’ because the idea of it leads to this impossibility, which Schelling sees as making the world’s life and intelligibility inexplicable; or the possibility that the move does not happen for a reason, in the sense of that which would ground the move.

Schelling is now clear that the transition from the infinite to the finite is inexplicable as a logical necessity: this point will later become vital in relation to Hegel. To sustain the anti-Spinozist position, a duplicity has somehow to arise, which entails a fundamentally new situation, but which must not entail an absolute difference from the initial situation: the same has to be both infinite and finite. Becoming something which is not the undifferentiated One is, Schelling argues, explicable as an act of ‘freedom’, which can have no prior causal explanation. However, becoming something entails necessity: the necessity of being that something. This leads back to the impossibility of knowing why the Absolute should become something, in that it thereby ceases to be absolute. Schelling moves towards the idea that God makes a free decision to create the world but that He does not have to make the decision: it is only the fact of the manifest world that is our evidence of the decision.17

We can only understand this notion of freedom if we are, as the FS suggested, able to acknowledge a groundless freedom in ourselves. This freedom is not Kant’s practical reason, which postulates our higher purpose as the higher aspect of nature, but rather freedom to take on all that we are as beings who are always already driven by the same forces as nature, the ground, and have the capacity for good and evil. Schelling suggests that nobody

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